Reverend Gadget, CEO and president of Left Coast EVs, says it’s greener to take an existing car and make it electric rather than starting from scratch in front of a 1947 Ford truck panel. He will electrify the truck. Photographed at his Florence warehouse on Saturday, July 6, 2019. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

The flag-draped casket of former President George H.W. Bush is carried by a joint services military honor guard into St. Martin’s Episcopal Church Thursday, Dec. 6, 2018, in Houston. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

This image released by Warner Bros. shows Lady Gaga in a scene from the latest reboot of the film, “A Star is Born.” On Thursday, Dec. 6, 2018, Lady Gaga was nominated for a Golden Globe award for lead actress in a motion picture drama for her role in the film. The 76th Golden Globe Awards will be held on Sunday, Jan. 6. (Clay Enos/Warner Bros. via AP)

But the name he prefers is simply gadget, actually Rev. Gadget, a playa name he took during a recent experience at Burning Man, a place in the Nevada desert people go to detach from the real world and discover their true selves.

“I’ve always been the gadget guy,” he said. “I take an old car, make it all electric by modifying it,” Greg “Rev. Gadget” Abbott, 60, said during an interview at his burnt-orange warehouse in Florence near Long Beach.

Gadget, CEO and president of Left Coast EVs, is at the top of the pyramid of a new kind of car customizing trend. Instead of adding spoilers and Hemi engines, Gadget “soups up” a car by stripping away the internal combustion engine and exhaust systems and replacing them with battery packs, electric motors and computer controls. The trend is profitable for companies who are acting on state mandates to convert gas-powered shuttle buses, vans and small trucks into battery-powered electric vehicles that pollute less and cut carbon emissions.

“This trend just continues to grow. And there is a growing need,” said Mark Duvall, director of energy utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto.

About 30 miles east of Gadget’s EV customizing lab, the operating floor of Phoenix Motorcars in Ontario is filled with internal combustion engine shuttle buses that have been stripped bare. To the left lies a pile of ICE engines, mufflers and exhaust pipes. To the right are rows of new lithium-ion battery packs. Last year, the company delivered 29 converted battery-electric shuttle buses to LAX, John Wayne, Ontario and Burbank airports, said spokesperson Jo Anne Avelar.

“This is popular, especially here in California where the (California Air Resources Board) mandate is that all transit companies have to be electric by 2040,” with at least 25% conversions starting in 2023 for some, said Tarek Helou, vice president of sales at Phoenix Motorcars.

So far, Phoenix conversion vehicles have traveled 1.8 million electric miles on customer routes, everything from airport shuttles to school buses to city utility vans, Helou said. “They are coming to us, asking us to electrify their fleets,” he explained.

Finding an electric niche

While some manufacturers, such as Protera, with a warehouse in City of Industry, and BYD in the Antelope Valley make larger transit buses, Phoenix has secured a niche in conversions of smaller vehicles. Like Gadget, they take an existing gas-powered vehicle and make it battery-electric.

The scales may differ but the philosophy is the same. No burning of fossil fuels. No exhaust. And less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the gas which gets trapped and is linked to global climate change. But there’s also something ethereal going on.

“It is part of the American experience to take cars and make them into different things, to customize them,” Duvall said.

From old to new

Gadget, who grew up in Torrance, built his first car at age 15½ while attending Palisades High School in West L.A. There he met a teacher who owned classic old cars, including a Bentley that tickled his fancy. He soon developed a fetish for cars from the ’30s, ’40’s, ’50s and ’60s and was one of the first to make a living converting them into EVs.

He drives a Porsche Speedster that runs all electric but remembers the 1947 Triumph Roadster he worked on back then. “The one where the trunk turned into a rumble seat,” he said, his smile moving his mustache up a notch.

Gadget made a name for himself as an early adopter of EVs. He was featured in both cult documentaries, “Who Killed The Electric Car?” (2006), about the demise of GM’s EV1, and “Revenge of The Electric Car” (2011), which tracks the EV resurgence. Gadget is prominently featured in the second Chris Paine film as the EV car converter who refuses to wait for the big car makers to join the EV parade.

Some people still call him to retrofit their cars after seeing these movies on YouTube.

“The phone has been ringing off the hook with people wanting to bring me their cars (for conversions),” he said.

One of his first projects more than 12 years ago was a lead-acid battery conversion of a 1967 Camaro for client Anthony Kiedis, lead singer for Red Hot Chili Peppers. Since then, he’s done hundreds of custom conversions, some for celebrities he’s not at liberty to name. But after turning 60, he only does four a year at most. A full conversion can cost between $125,000 and $250,000, he said.

He’s working on a 1947 Ford pickup truck, which sits in his warehouse floor with a new steel frame, air bags, electric windows and disc brakes — all added — ready to have a Tesla battery back and battery management system installed.

“I have a rule. I don’t let it in here with the gasoline parts,” said Gadget, the man who answered “Big Oil” to the question who killed GM’s first electric car in the documentary.

Celebrities and TV shows

Gadget was introduced to Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk during Tesla’s auction of its very first EV, the Tesla Roadster, at Santa Monica Airport. He’s known for being Musk’s interrupter at parties. “Well, we are acquaintances,” Gadget said. “We will end up at the same parties together. I will go on and say: ‘Elon, you are needed over here,’” when Musk wants to extricate himself from a time-consuming guest.

He’s won awards for his designs of upholstery from Chrysler. He has produced art installations designed by artists at LAX and other places, including fabricating the giant needle sticking out of a building in the Garment District of downtown L.A.

His own celebrity status includes stints on several Discovery Channel reality shows. “Big!” featured him and other engineers breaking Guinness Book world records, including building the biggest vacuum cleaner. After building the world’s largest guitar, the producers brought in Peter Frampton to play it, Gadget said.

In “Smash Lab,” he blew up 23 Crown Victoria sedans in an attempt to find better steering or collision-avoidance systems. In one episode, he wore a GPS device and threw himself overboard and floated in Long Beach Harbor until rescuers detected his signal and found him. In “The Colony,” another show, he was hired as a consultant to come up with crazy ideas and was given the title “post-apocalyptic survivor expert.”

“I understood people. I understood physics. I could tell the producers who was going to get mad. I could predict when a fight would happen,” he said with a wry smile.

Creating a new future

With a resume too long to list, Gadget sits back in a chair in his dimly lit warehouse, feet stretched out, Othello, his cat, resting comfortably on his legs. He ponders how he wants to be remembered.

“I love being a designer. But it is not as interesting as somebody who re-imagines old cars for electric,” he said, dreaming about finishing the Ford pickup and taking it on a test drive — to San Francisco and back.

Steve Scauzillo covers environment, public health and transportation for the Southern California News Group. He has won two journalist of the year awards from the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club and is a recipient of the Aldo Leopold Award for Distinguished Editorial Writing on environmental issues. Steve studied biology/chemistry when attending East Meadow High School and Nassau College in New York (he actually loved botany!) and then majored in social ecology at UCI until switching to journalism. He also earned a master's degree in media from Cal State Fullerton. He has been an adjunct professor since 2005. Steve likes to take the train, subway and bicycle – sometimes all three – to assignments and the newsroom. He has two grown sons, Andy and Matthew. Steve recently watched all of “Star Trek” the remastered original season one on Amazon, so he has an inner nerd.

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